The University of Miami (UM) main campus is located in Coral Gables, Florida. It also has a medical campus in Miami, and the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Virginia Key. It is the second largest employer in Miami-Dade county. The current president of the University of Miami is Donna E. Shalala, who severed in the Clinton Administration as Secretary of Health and Human Services from 1993 to 2001.

The University of Miami is frequently confused with Miami University which is located in Ohio.

Football team

The school has had a long and embarrassing history with its football team. In 1935, a group of Miami football supporters tried to hire Red Grange as coach. However, the move was vetoed by President Bowman Foster Ashe, in part because of the $7,500 salary that Grange had requested,[6] and there have been tensions with alumni over the management of the team ever since.

In the middle of the 1954 football season, the NCAA imposed two one-year penalties against Miami for providing transportation and tryouts to prospective players.[7] As a result, Gustafson's 1954 squad was ineligible to play in a bowl game. Following the season, Gustafson decided to step down as head coach.

At the end of the 1978 football season (his second as head coach) Lou Saban resigned in the wake of a controversy concerning football players throwing an orthodox Jewish employee of the campus Jewish ministry into Lake Osceola, a lake on the campus.[8]

Through the 1990 football season, UM had played football games against the University of Notre Dame for 27 years. In 1990, the UM team lost to Notre Dame 29–20, and Notre Dame had decided to discontinue the series,[9] feeling the intensity of the games had reached an unhealthy level.[10]

In 1994, Tony Russell, a former UM academic advisor, pleaded guilty to helping more than 80 student athletes, 57 of whom were football players, falsify Pell Grant applications in exchange for kickbacks from the players themselves. The scandal dated all the way back to 1989 and secured more than $220,000 in federal grant money. Federal officials later said that Russell had engineered "perhaps the largest centralized fraud ... ever committed" in the history of the Pell Grant program.[11][12]

On June 21, 1996, Miami football players broke into the apartment of the captain of Miami's track team and struck him repeatedly. In response, Head Coach Butch Davis suspended three key players for the coming 1996 season. Davis also suspended two other players who were involved in separate violent incidents.[13]

The 2005 football season also fell in controversy when it was reported several Miami football players had recorded a rap song in 2004 that contained lewd sexual references.[14][15] Following the negative national publicity, the University issued a statement condemning the lyrics.[16]

The 2006 season included an on-field brawl with the Florida International football team and the shooting death of UM defensive tackle Bryan Pata.

During spring break 2011, a UM football player was charged with resisting arrest with violence and battery on a Coconut Grove police officer.[17]

In March 2011, the NCAA began an investigation of the UM football team. In August 2011, alumnus Nevin Shapiro told Yahoo Sports that he provided dozens of athletes and recruits with so-called “extra benefits” including cash, meals, strip club access and yacht rides over an eight-year span starting in 2002. While the investigation is pending, UM declined to participate in 2011 and 2012 post season football games.[18]

Despite these setbacks, UM tries to focus a great deal of its public reputation on its football team.